Abbott a Tea Party clone, says Wayne Swan

He also told delegates at the Australian Labor Party's national conference in Sydney on Friday that the opposition's economic agenda would devastate Australians' living standards.

Speaking to the party's economic platform, Mr Swan likened the economic policies of the Liberals to those of the conservative Tea Party movement in the US.

"This goes to the heart of what you're seeing in the extremism in the United States politics, where the Tea Party movement has virtually taken over the United States Republican Party," he told the conference at Darling Harbour.

"Here that Tea Party movement is now represented in the Liberal Party of Australia, by its leader Tony Abbott. This crazy Tea Party politics that says that basic economics doesn't matter."

Mr Swan also challenged the coalition's opposition to the carbon tax and mining tax, saying it had yet to detail how it would achieve its proposed $70 billion of budget cuts.

"It would certainly lead at the end of the day to a reduction of living standards for millions of Australians," he added.

Mr Swan said Australia did not want to go down the same road as America, where the benefits of economic growth were not fairly distributed, leaving the US with stagnant wages growth and massive unemployment.

Australia was looking forward to managing its resources boom and the reaping the benefits of the "Asian century".

"We simply can't squib the very large issues when it comes to building a prosperous future for our country," Mr Swan said.